check-banned FAILED: Malformed UTF-8 character

Mark Martinec Mark.Martinec+amavis at ijs.si
Tue Apr 3 20:11:46 CEST 2012


Peter,

> we are running postfix + amavisd-new 2.7.0 on RHEL3 (perl v5.8.0).
> 
> From time to time mails get stuck in the postfix queue
> because of the following error
> 
>    451 4.5.0 Error in processing, id=02676-02, check-banned FAILED:
>    Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0x81, with no
>    preceding start byte) in substitution iterator at /usr/sbin/amavisd
>    line 2874. (in reply to end of DATA command))
> 
> It looks like the substitution command in "sub sanitize_str"
> does not handle all cases of input.
> 
> As work-around we put an eval around the command but this
> seems very ugly because it heals the symptoms but does
> not remove the root cause. :-)
> 
>     eval {
>     $str =~ s/([^\040-\133\135-\176])/      # and \240-\376 ?
>       exists($quote_controls_map{$1}) ? $quote_controls_map{$1} :
>            sprintf(ord($1)>255 ? '\\x{%04x}' : '\\%03o', ord($1))/egs;
>     }
> 
> Is there any other known solution beside upgrading the OS (+perl +...)
> to get rid of the problem?
> 
> Best regards,
> Peter
> 
> PS: We already set a non UTF8-locale (LANG = LC_ALL = C) in the
> init scripts of postfix & amavisd.

A manifestation of the Perl bug #32687:

  Encode::is_utf8 on tainted UTF8 string returns false
  https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=32687


If you had perl 5.8.1 you could use utf8::is_utf8 instead,
but that is not available in 5.8.0 yet.

I forgot that we have already seen and avoided this bug
back in 2004:

amavisd-new-2.2.1 release notes:

- avoid the use of Encode::is_utf8 due to a Perl bug (still present in
  5.8.8, Encode::is_utf8 on tainted utf8 character string produces false);
  Perl bug tracking: #32687: Encode::is_utf8 on tainted UTF8 string
  returns false;


Please try the attached patch, it avoids testing Encode::is_utf8
and just calls safe_encode() unconditionally.

  Mark

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